|
|
|
After all the myriad announcements from Google about its changes to maps and mapping apps, it’s nice to see MapQuest update its look and feel. Sources tell me the company behind the new look is Cartifact, who did a similar update for Yahoo! in 2007.
“27 members of Google’s staff and around 200 people from around the world and Africa (I’ve heard conflicting reports of higher numbers) descended upon the capital city of Uganda for a technology conference dedicated to the topic of geospatial data and information systems.”
- Jonathan Gosier writing in his AppAfrica.Net blog about the AfricaGIS conference this week. The review covers the venue and social media participation. This effort could explain the huge number of Googlers at the event.
The House passed the bill (2489, “To authorize a national cooperative geospatial imagery program through the United States Geological Survey to promote use of remote sensing data.”) that would provide $10 million a year for a national grant program to make geospatial imagery more available and usable. The funds would go to the Dept of Interior and be distributed until 2019.
- FCW
An article at CRN highlights what some industry leaders consider the most disruptive technologies today, during the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO) conference in Austin, Texas. Among them: virtualization (if you don’t know what that is, this is a good time to look it up!) and social networking. And, geodata and its use.
Jack Dangermond, president and CEO of ESRI, a Redlands, Calif.-based geographic information systems (GIS) developer, said the IT industry has only scratched the surface in leveraging GPS and imagery data.
“It’s all about seeing the world as a map. It’s so powerful from a visualization perspective, but also from an analytic perspective, with special relationships and how things are related. GIS is becoming embedded within the fabric of government. It’s being used for planning, monitoring and communicating with citizens,” he said.
“People say the sharing of government data on the Web is the next step for democracy, Web 2.0 for government,” he added. “The concept of data sharing is not new. But all of these efforts haven’t resulted in a platform to build applications in a consistent way. That’s beginning to change. “
There are some key ideas hidden in there:
“data sharing is not new”
Indeed. ESRI and others have worked to offer the technology to make sharing easier (The Geography Network, ArcGIS Explorer, the new ArcGIS Online, GOS to name just a few ESRI efforts). The issue is not tech so much (though that is a factor) but people and policies. (NB Santa Clara County, California for one.)
“But all of these efforts haven’t resulted in a platform to build applications in a consistent way.”
Is our goal a platform to build apps in a consistent way? I feel sure OGC would say we should aim to build them in an interoperable way. I would argue the core technologies that make up the Web are the closest thing we have to a consistent way at this point.
“That’s beginning to change.”
I’m not sure to which point this statement is addressed, but there is no question that change is in the air. My sense is the biggest change is simply citizen expectation. Citizen’s expect to be able to access geodata and ask and answer questions. Google and others have set that expectation very, very high. Its up to ESRI and other companies (Google, Microsoft and other included) that serve government to insure their expectations are met.
Last I looked there some 300 news articles about Google announcement yesterday of the beta of Google Navigation for the Android (and perhaps other) platforms. Stocks of PND players like TomTom and Garmin were down (though there were other reasons for the slipping stock prices, too). Mostly, though the sentiment was “Google will be killing off another industry.” Perhaps.
After a day of watching I have just a few thoughts.
Back when Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ were acquired by TomTom and Nokia the general sentiment was that no one could possibly challenge “the big two.” Why? Collecting and confirming mapping datasets for the large areas they already cover (with very good, if not perfect, accuracy) was too hard and costly and they had such a big headstart. Smaller players, like AND and Germany’s United Maps, have toughed it out, working to state their differentiations (better licensing for the former and feet on the ground to fill in the holes for the latter). Neither has taken on the big two, but my sense after speaking to senior company reps recently is that they are doing fine, thank you. No, no one seemed to think that Google, the company that wants to organize the world’s information, was going to work to collect and conflate and update geodata. But, apparently, we were not thinking like Google. Sure Google still licenses some data (parcels and imagery and even some road data) but clearly, they’ve taken on the big two, the two that now have no only a headstart with data, but also a headstart in cell phone hardware and navigation, when paired with their larger owners.
My other thought as the errors in Google’s dataset become the butt of James Fee’s jokes and real concern by those in Canton, Ohio, is that most people are doing just fine with the data. I’m one of them. Even though we at Directions Media were the ones to contact Tele Atlas to confirm Google was using its own data in the U.S. a few weeks back, I use Google Maps exactly as I have in the past. In fact, two weeks ago I routed myself to, then printed out Google Maps of key areas in a marathon my friends were running north of Boston. No issues. In fact, until I returned home from the event, it didn’t occur to me that maybe, just maybe that was not such a great choice. For most people, for most things, Google Maps seems to work fine. And, as many are pointing out, online navigation services that use NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas data have errors and sometimes route “oddly.” Google has an edge that will likely get their quirks fixed better and faster: the “report a problem” button. I’ve written time and time again how the Yahoo and MapQuest and Ask.com (and other services) don’t provide direct ways to report errors. Nor do NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas. Oh, the websites are out there (and TomTom does have MapShare). The number of people using those tools can’t possibly compare to those using Google’s in app “report a problem.” The tools never got the buzz that Google Maps is getting, either.
Finally, on the day Google rolled out the new app NAVTEQ reported on a survey (which I guess it financed, though it was not stated in the press release) that showed that 72% of users of nav tools it powers are “ok” with ads in the apps and some 19% click on the ads. Another 6% actually visit the businesses. So, it seems Google’s business model (advertising) is a good one.
